Yvonne Loriod

Yvonne Loriod and Olivier Messiaen in 1982.

Yvonne Loriod (born January 20, 1924 in Houilles near Paris , † May 17, 2010 in Saint-Denis ) was a French pianist .

Life

At the age of 14, Yvonne Loriod had already mastered an extensive repertoire with the Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach , all 27 piano concertos by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , the 32 sonatas for piano by Ludwig van Beethoven and the complete works of Frédéric Chopin .

She studied at the Conservatoire de Paris , where Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen were among her teachers. Here she expanded her repertoire to include works by impressionists such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel . Loriod also turned consistently to contemporary composers, such as Arnold Schönberg , André Jolivet , Pierre Boulez and others.

At the age of 25, she became a professor at the Paris Conservatory in 1949. She was the soloist in the French premieres of Béla Bartók's first and second piano concertos . Concert tours have taken her to many major European cities, to North Africa and North and South America. In 1958 she became professor for piano at the Karlsruhe University of Music . From 1967 to 1989 she taught at the Conservatoire de Paris. In addition, she was also active in the Darmstadt summer courses .

In 1961 Yvonne Loriod became the second wife of Olivier Messiaen. She was the most important and often the first interpreter of Messiaen's works for or with piano and also administered his musical legacy. Her sister Jeanne Loriod (1928–2001) was also closely associated with Messiaen's work as an Ondes Martenot virtuoso.

Yvonne Loriod died in Saint-Denis in 2010.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Le Monde , source AFP, accessed June 5, 2010
2. ^ Announcement in Le Figaro, accessed on May 18, 2010